SEO Press Releases and Powerful Blog Posts

marketing

A lot of people begin a small blog for their business thinking that it’ll be the source of passive income and easy money.

Although blogging can definitely bring you more cash for your business, it’s unlikely to turn a profit in the first few weeks. More importantly, you have to remember that a blog is not usually a source of income, but a source of new customers.

Skip the philosophy. How much do I have to blog to make money?

Assuming you’re using your blog as a way to generate traffic and create interest in your business’s service, it should really only take a week or two before you start to see the financial benefits of your blog.

For the sake of transparency, I’ll tell you that we wrote about three blog posts in two weeks and landed our first client–without paying for advertising.

After that, things kept snowballing.

If you’ve written a few blog posts yourself, but you haven’t seen these kinds of results (or you’re still stuck at your day job), just consider these pointers:

You need to share information that your potential customers want. It might feel wrong to give away valuable information for free, but you are getting something incredibly valuable in return: new customers.

SEO is a critical element of driving new traffic. Simply putting a post on your website isn’t enough. Make sure you include highly searched keywords, and add tags and links when possible.

Send people to your posts from social media. Although blogs generate their own traffic, they become exponentially more effective in search engines when there are multiple links and established readers for those posts. Creating your own audience proves to search engines that your content is valuable.

Unfortunately, there’s no set number, but there are a few guidelines that can help make the decision easier.

Every time you share a new blog posts, you’re going to get a spike in visitors. That’s because new content gets preference on search engines.

But that doesn’t mean you need a new post every single day.

Here are the two questions you need to ask yourself:

How many new customers or inquiries does one post usually create?

How many customers can we actually service in one week?

For us, it takes just one or two posts a week to generate a full-time workload.

If you’re selling a digital information product, these questions won’t make sense for you, because you can handle a virtually infinite number of customers.

But if your business has restraints (time spent servicing customers, materials available for sale, etc), you should find the sweet spot where your blog posts are generating just enough customers to satisfy your workload.

Once you reach that point, you can begin lowering demand by increasing your prices (which is exactly what we did last month).

When people write a press release, they usually make one subtle mistake–a mistake that ruins their chances of success before they ever send the press release out.

They think the purpose of the press release is to spread the word about a business.

Of course, that’s the ultimate goal: to get coverage. But the real purpose, at least for the editor who reads it, has nothing to do with your company.

The real purpose is to make life easier for the editors and writers you contact.

Editors look at hundreds of press releases every single day.

Just let that sink in for a minute. Imagine reading 200 press release headlines every day. It takes hours and hours to go through all of them, and the most an editor can hope for is that a few of them make for an interesting story.

If it’s not instantly clear how the writers could drum up a story with your press release, the editor will most likely pass on it.

But if you can create a press release that presents a clear, interesting story right off the bat, then you make life easier for the editor.

When it comes to marketing, every person on Earth knows that you need to stand out, be unique, paint yourself purple, and stick out like a sore thumb.

I’m not saying that advice is wrong, but it’s important to remember that standing out and blending in are not opposites!

Here’s what I mean:

By associating your business with similar groups, you can draw a lot more attention to yourself. Don’t try to be a lone wolf! Instead, find the businesses that compliment your services and start cross-marketing.

Here are a few ways you can do that.

Throw a Charity Event.

If you have a local business, get together with others for a charity or social event. It will create goodwill for your brand and draw in new potential customers.

This can be especially useful for newer businesses to make a name for themselves in the community.

Digital Business? No Problem.
Just Don’t Get Stuck in the Friend Zone.